How do you think Ansible can help me? I’ve read about it a few times but it’s hard for me to understand it’s actual usage without spending time playing with it.
I can possibly look into it a bit more in the future. I’ve got a few things I’m working on like learning how to do TLS with Caddy so I can reduce my dependency with Cloudflare.
Ansible is an automation tool to setup systems to a known desirable end state.
TBH, for a single device, it’s overkill, but you seem like someone who keeps good notes and has some custom files to copy across… you could convert your setup note into an Ansible file, and it will also copy over your custom config files.
For Ansible you define the desired outcome and it does “all” (kinda) the work for you… so… say you want Apache, MariaDB and PHP, it doesn’t matter if half are installed already, or not, or their dependencies - you just say:
Do an update
Install packages:
A
B
C
Copy my config files over
Start the services
Relax
Yep, it’ll take 10 times as long to get it working up front, but the day you want to duplicate it / start on a fresh Pi / VM, it’s all there for you.
I use it to setup all my Pi Zeros thr same way (they’re doing BLE presence detection) and for their regular updates
I’ve also got some VMs setup that way
But… I tried it on a laptop and as it’s a single device I just ended up setting it up manually and now the ansible script is woefully out of date… just some balanced feedback.
How do you think Ansible can help me? I’ve read about it a few times but it’s hard for me to understand it’s actual usage without spending time playing with it.
I can possibly look into it a bit more in the future. I’ve got a few things I’m working on like learning how to do TLS with Caddy so I can reduce my dependency with Cloudflare.
Ansible is an automation tool to setup systems to a known desirable end state.
TBH, for a single device, it’s overkill, but you seem like someone who keeps good notes and has some custom files to copy across… you could convert your setup note into an Ansible file, and it will also copy over your custom config files.
For Ansible you define the desired outcome and it does “all” (kinda) the work for you… so… say you want Apache, MariaDB and PHP, it doesn’t matter if half are installed already, or not, or their dependencies - you just say:
Do an update Install packages: A B C Copy my config files over Start the services Relax
Yep, it’ll take 10 times as long to get it working up front, but the day you want to duplicate it / start on a fresh Pi / VM, it’s all there for you.
I use it to setup all my Pi Zeros thr same way (they’re doing BLE presence detection) and for their regular updates
I’ve also got some VMs setup that way
But… I tried it on a laptop and as it’s a single device I just ended up setting it up manually and now the ansible script is woefully out of date… just some balanced feedback.